The last time NPR hired a CEO, it poached her from The New York Times. This time, it looked to the makers of “Sesame Street.”

By selecting someone with virtually no newsroom experience but a long history of both defending the federal funding of public media and raising money, NPR signaled that the battle ahead will not be about journalism, but about survival.

The contrast between the résumés of Vivian Schiller, who resigned in a political firestorm in March, and Gary Knell, chosen last week to take her place, speaks volumes about the fight over its financial future that NPR believes it has on its hands.

Our position “has been that we have an important story to tell members of Congress and the American people about just how valuable our programming is,” said Dave Edwards, chairman of NPR’s board. “That’s the primary mission for the board. That’s the primary mission for Gary Knell, to tell that story. But along the way, you have to plan for all sorts of eventualities.”

And one of those “eventualities” is losing the funding that has been a favorite target of congressional Republicans — especially after NPR’s hasty firing of commentator Juan Williams last fall touched off an avalanche of criticism from conservatives.

So far, the defunding measures have failed, largely because Democrats control the Senate — a hold that seems increasingly tenuous. And so NPR has begun preparing for the worst.

“Months ago, when the discussion for eliminating federal funding for NPR came about, the board asked management to look into what it would mean,” Edwards said. “For example, what would the impact be on NPR? As it turns out, relatively little. Most of the money that goes to public broadcasting goes to the stations.”

NPR has a complex funding and governance structure that renders the political calls to “defund” it all but impossible to realize in a meaningful way

Only about two percent of NPR’s budget comes directly from congressionally appropriated funds that are distributed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But the hundreds of public radio stations that buy NPR programming get about 10 percent of their budgets from the CPB. Stations in poor and sparsely populated areas can rely on it much more. All together, the public radio system receives about $100 million in federal funds each year.

Earlier this month, the House subcommittee on appropriations took up legislation that would bar local stations from using their federal grants to pay NPR fees — a tactic that has been used before, but, because money is fungible, is likely to hurt local stations far more than NPR.

But the legislation shows that NPR is not likely to cease being a political target anytime soon. And for that reason, NPR executives during Schiller’s tenure explored ways they could wean themselves from taxpayer dollars and the political distractions they bring, according to sources familiar with the discussions.

Schiller suggested such a need herself in a tweet praising the choice of Knell: “New @npr CEO Gary Knell is an experienced leader, a good man and a friend. Best shot to liberate pubradio from untenable reliance on fed $$”

Such discussions have been going on, in one way or another, for a long time.

“For years and years, people have always discussed whether there is a way that NPR could eventually be independent of government funds,” said Daniel Zwerdling, a longtime NPR reporter. “Everybody would love to not go through the political battles year after year.”

On the other hand, he added, “it’s not an easy issue because a lot of member stations depend fairly significantly on public funding, and it raises troubling questions — what would happen if all federal funding were cut off? Do people in the United States think it’s important to have noncommercial news voices in most communities? I hope they do.”

So he emphasized that the public radio system may always need public funds, and that any change would have to happen gradually.

Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the City University of New York, author of “Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work,” and one of the more vocal advocates of NPR giving up its federal funding, believes the answer is obvious, if politically unpalatable.

“The bottom line on the stations is they are as doomed as newspapers,” he said.

He argues that for smaller, poorer stations that don’t produce much of their own content, the forces of the digital media revolution will overtake them anyway.

“Some stations have tremendous local value,” he said. “But most of the stations are there primarily for their broadcast tower and their value is distribution for national programming. And that’s going to decline markedly, and their lot in life is going to get harder and harder, and their dependence on federal funding gets greater.”

Like NPR, the larger, wealthier member stations are preparing for a possible future without federal dollars, though they would not be hurt too badly. For example, KPCC, in Southern California, only gets about five percent of its funding from the CPB, according to program director Craig Curtis.

“We have contingency plans at KPCC for status quo, gradual reduction of funding and even elimination,” he said. “While I wouldn’t throw that money back in the pot, it wouldn’t be devastating for us to lose it.”

Inside the world of public radio, this is not such an outrageous thing to say. But when Ron Schiller, NPR’s former top fundraiser, was caught on tape in a sting video by conservative activists working for James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, saying that NPR would be “better off” without public funding, it resulted in another damaging controversy for NPR.

That, plus some disparaging comments about the tea party — which seemed in part to be summaries of what someone had told him — cost Schiller his job.

House Republicans picked up the the “better off” comment and used it to fuel their push to take away funding, arguing that even NPR executives considered the federal aid unnecessary.

Dana Davis Rehm, a spokeswoman for NPR, pushed back against the notion that NPR would ever seek to give up its public funding.

“Suggestions that NPR could or would do anything to invite the loss of critical funding for public broadcasting are untrue and irresponsible. Federal funding is important to the entire public broadcasting system, particularly for member stations, and we’re going to work very hard to preserve that funding,” she said.

“Like any well-managed organization, it’s the work of management to consider how best to grow revenue and to plan for how we would weather a shift in any of our funding sources. Public radio is made up of hundreds of independent local stations who are responsible for serving their communities as they see fit. It isn’t the business of NPR to make decisions for all of public radio.”

Whatever the wishes of NPR, Republicans are ready to renew the fight, especially if they win a Senate majority next year.

“If NPR and PBS believe they offer a product that Americans want, they can prove that by competing in the free market,” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who has led the charge for defunding, said in a statement to POLITICO.

With this political minefield stretched before him, Knell has thus far stepped carefully — while keeping open the debate about a future for NPR without taxpayer money.

“There is a need to have public funding, and I think it needs to be better articulated,” Knell told NPR’s Melissa Block in an interview. “But I would say that, you know, we’ve got to look at every one of our funding sources.”

Reaction to his selection suggests that NPR member stations and staffers believe that Knell, whom NPR would not make available for an interview, has the right skill set to walk this line — in particular his experience on Capitol Hill.

In the early part of his career, Knell served as counsel to the Senate Judiciary and Governmental Affairs committees. During his days at Sesame Workshop, formerly the Children’s Television Workshop, which he joined in 1989 and has led since 2000, he testified before Congress and made formal appeals for the importance of CPB funding.

“I think Gary has to use the connections that he has established at PBS and at Sesame [Street] to deepen those connections to Congress,” said Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR’s former ombudsman and vice president of news. “But he also has to get ready to eat a lot of rubber chicken. He has to go and he has to talk.”

He believes that past CEOs did not spend enough time selling NPR to the public.

“The absence of that in the past few years has been very crippling for NPR,” he said. “NPR has much to be proud of, and it has also to advocate for itself in a very effective way. And I think that’s been part of NPR’s difficulty. They’ve been shy egomaniacs about their own product.”

Schiller, who joined NPR in 2008 from a career in commercial media, is generally credited with building a stronger organization, both journalistically and financially. She turned around a $20 million budget deficit, beefed up reporting capabilities at the local stations and created a digital infrastructure so strong that the organization dropped the “radio” from its name, rebranding itself as simply NPR.

Many believe that if Schiller, who has been hired as chief digital officer at NBC News, had not gotten tripped up in the politics, she’d still be running the place at NPR.

Now Knell will have to succeed in the areas where she did not — public relations and Capitol Hill.

“I consider it a safe but not bold choice,” said Alicia Shepard, who served as NPR’s ombudsman through the whole Juan Williams affair and its fallout. “I thought Vivian was a bold choice.”